- August 6, 2014
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Video Marketing: Because Your Sales Staff Isn’t in Kansas Anymore
In a poignant moment of self-realization, a bemused Dorothy reluctantly acknowledges her arrival in a strange and unfamiliar world. She’s not sure where she is. But she’s certain it isn’t home.
No doubt your sales team has had a similar epiphany.
Thanks to the Internet, the selling process, especially in B2B, bears little resemblance to times past. These days, most prospects won’t contact sales reps until they’re almost ready to buy. In fact, nearly 60 percent of the sales process is complete before a rep is even engaged, according to one recent study commissioned by Google and others.
Instead of questioning sales people, customers go online and arm themselves with information from all across the internet, including forums, review sites and whatever data they can extract from your company’s web pages.
So, what’s the best way to satisfy this new breed of self-motivated, information-hungry customer?
In a word: video.
YouTube alone gets a billion unique monthly visitors and it’s just one of many online video sites. By 2018, video will comprise nearly 80% of all consumer internet traffic, according to a new study by tech giant, Cisco. Bytemobile also reports that online video now accounts for more than half of all mobile traffic, and that mobile viewership will only rise with time.
Of course, we’ve been encouraging you to get on the video bandwagon for years. Perhaps these myths have been holding you back. Or you haven’t seen our extensive library of video production and other tips.
But now, like Dorothy’s peripatetic posse bounding down the Yellow Brick Road, it really IS time to muster your courage and apply your heart and brain power toward getting some video into your marketing mix.
Start with These Three
A large video company reports that in a recent survey of 1,000 U.S. adults, 96 percent of respondents find videos helpful when making purchase decisions; 71 percent agree that videos leave them with a “positive impression” of a brand, service, product or company. Use these tips to formulate a strategy, then get busy producing at least these three types of video:
- A Company Overview: People are visual beings, and video provides a great visual medium for introducing your company’s founding story, mission, business philosophy and employees. Let your culture or brand personality shine through and tell viewers how you are different. Keep it under five minutes, which is the ideal length for influencing opinion, according to the survey.
- A Product or Service Demonstration: Showing beats telling any day, and Forrester’s researchers say that one minute of video is worth about 1.8 million words. “How To” and “How it Works” videos bring your product to life and allow benefits such as time or cost savings, quality or reliability spring from the screen. Google’s search algorithm may also rank content it deems “helpful” to readers higher in its search results.
- Customer Testimonials: Third-party accounts (always obtained with permission) provide a unique, powerful and authentic way to connect with curious prospects. Seeing others articulate how your company helped them overcome a difficult or familiar challenge builds credibility and trust by making your claims more believable.
Without online video, selling will only get harder, and with the cost of equipment well within most companies’ reach, excuses for not posting online clips have all but evaporated.
Where should your first videos go?
Well, there’s no place like your home page. But don’t forget to also integrate them into your entire marketing and sales strategy.